Naked sea butterfly

After savoring the last dish of deep-sea fish sashimi from Callisto, Luo Ruzhuo drank a cup of karst worm juice to fill the gaps. Only then did she feel her stomach was packed full.

Anna could no longer spare a thought for the jumble in her mind. All she could think about was Luo Ruzhuo's appetite. "Dear... don't you think your appetite is a little too big?"

None of the guides she had met ate anywhere near as much as Luo Ruzhuo. Her appetite even rivaled those of high-ranking sentinels.

Now that Anna mentioned it, Luo Ruzhuo had indeed noticed her appetite growing lately. Every day, after drinking three doses of mental power growth potion, her head felt a little itchy, as though she were about to grow a brain.

"!" Anna knew about her situation. As soon as she heard that, she jumped up and, without another word, pulled Luo Ruzhuo straight to the Black Tower's testing center.

On the night before her trial, Luo Ruzhuo had been taken by a bailiff to the Black Tower testing center on Central Star. The equipment there was highly accurate. At first, she hadn't controlled her mental power output properly, causing the readings to fluctuate. When they peaked at SS, she caught a glimpse of the tester's face contorting and immediately reduced her output. It finally stabilized at C, and the tester's expression improved somewhat.

This time, she wasn't there to have her mental power level tested. Instead, she had been dragged in for a mental domain examination.

The Black Tower tester here was a round-faced girl who looked very young, but handled the equipment with remarkable skill and maturity. She studied the image on the scanner for a long time before finally declaring, "That's right!"

She pulled up the scan with a smile and pointed to an almost transparent speck of light less than a millimeter across. "Congratulations! Your Mental Entity has hatched!"

What?

"My... Mental Entity?" Luo Ruzhuo pointed at her own face, at a loss for a moment. "A speck of light?"

Even calling it a speck of light was generous. Luo Ruzhuo hadn't noticed it at first—it was so small she thought it was noise on the screen.

The round-faced tester nodded, all professionalism. "The preliminary identification is a naked sea butterfly. It's normal for it to be this small; it should still be a juvenile. Don't worry. Keep taking growth solution during this period, and your awakened Mental Entity will mature within the next month. An adult naked sea butterfly is about three to five centimeters long."

She used her thumb and forefinger to show roughly how long that was.

Luo Ruzhuo copied the gesture, then fell silent.

She needed some time to digest the fact that her Mental Entity's size had to be compared to a fingernail.

Beside her, Anna had taken the news well and was already cheering. "That's wonderful!"

Luo Ruzhuo: ? What's wonderful about it?

Anna's voice was full of envy. "It's so small. That's incredibly convenient! Why can't my Mental Entity get that small? Then I wouldn't have to struggle so much to get through sentinels' mental barriers when I purify them!"

The round-faced tester nodded in agreement. "Exactly! Lots of guides say that whenever they struggle to break through a sentinel's mental barrier, they wish their Mental Entities were electric drills!"

Luo Ruzhuo: ...

Was it difficult to get through a sentinel's mental barrier? Judging from her previous two experiences with purification, it was as if the barrier didn't exist.

She didn't voice the question, though.

From her observations over the past few days, Luo Ruzhuo had realized that her knowledge of sentinels and guides was sorely lacking. If she wasn't careful about what she said and did, she might make a fool of herself.

After running another examination to confirm the Mental Entity's condition, the round-faced tester promptly updated Luo Ruzhuo's information on the optical computer.

A short while later, the testing room's communication interface lit up. Once the round-faced tester accepted the call, a familiar face appeared in the projection. The young man was smiling warmly. It was Fang Yingbai.

Through the virtual screen, Fang Yingbai greeted Luo Ruzhuo from afar. "Hello, Miss Luo. I received the good news from the testing room. Congratulations! From now on, you're a truly complete guide!"

For a moment, Luo Ruzhuo didn't know what to say. So she'd been disabled before, was that it?

"Congratulations aside, the Guide Association requires guides with complete Mental Entities to have their compatibility ratings tested at the matching center. Could you come by when you have time?"

Luo Ruzhuo made no attempt to hide her distrust of Fang Yingbai. Right in front of the virtual projection, she asked Anna about it, and only nodded after Anna confirmed it. "All right, I'll come over in a little while."

Fang Yingbai: ...

It was the first time he had been treated this way since becoming president.

Distrust or not, after taking Anna back to the dormitory, Luo Ruzhuo came to the matching center as promised.

It was located in the tower's central district. Inside the pure white, streamlined building was a spacious lobby. The matte stone flooring was much like that of the registration office, and the interior layout was also similar, apart from the curtain of light in the middle.

She had already learned a little about compatibility ratings from that red-crowned crane, so Luo Ruzhuo had some idea what to expect.

She passed through the curtain of light, and her identification information automatically popped up-

Name: Luo Ruzhuo

Age: 23

Mental Entity: naked sea butterfly

Gender: female guide

Rank: C

Contamination level: 0%

Affiliated team: none

Luo Ruzhuo tapped "confirm," and the scene around her changed automatically. After a brief spell of dizziness, she was transported into a sealed white room.

The staff here wore yet another kind of uniform. They showed no traces of mental power and were probably ordinary people.

Following a staff member's directions, Luo Ruzhuo entered a partially enclosed cubicle of about six square meters. The lighting was soft, and the sounds of birds and insects came from somewhere other than the room itself. She glanced at the device producing them. They had existed before the apocalypse too; she believed they were called white noise generators.

After sitting down in the chair in the center, Luo Ruzhuo felt someone gently press her shoulders from behind.

She stiffened slightly. The staff member was a woman in her thirties with a soft voice. "Please relax, Guide. I'm applying bio-information patches. Over the next hour, these six patches will collect information about your Guide Element and the active periods of your glands, among other things. Just remain as you normally are."

Luo Ruzhuo then felt several small, metal-like discs being placed on her neck. They were cool to the touch, and once attached, they produced a faint tingling sensation. It didn't hurt, but it wasn't particularly comfortable either.

To cooperate with the staff member, Luo Ruzhuo gradually relaxed her tense body.

The hour passed quickly.

The staff member removed the patches. Luo Ruzhuo rotated her stiff neck and stretched, feeling no different from usual.

"All done." The staff member uploaded the information to the optical computer. "You can go back and wait now. The compatibility results will appear as numbers on your personal terminal, and a report on your best-matched sentinels will also be generated-"

"You may choose whether or not to look at it. The entire process and its results are one-way, visible only to you, Guide."

Luo Ruzhuo nodded, tapping her fingers lightly on the back of the chair as she thought. "Will the matched sentinel know?"

The staff member's smile didn't change. "Rest assured, unless you bring them here yourself for a one-on-one compatibility test, they won't know."

Luo Ruzhuo keenly noticed the staff member's choice of words: not "he," but "they."

Was there more than one matched sentinel?

Soon after returning to the dormitory, she got the answer to that question.

Luo Ruzhuo had just finished a hot bath. She picked up a glass of juice Big Yellow had left beside the bathroom and gulped it down. It tasted sweet and tart, like orange juice.

Humming in a good mood, Luo Ruzhuo opened the report sent by the matching center-

Then she was stunned by the table, which ran eighteen pages long.